With the 2013 NFL season now over, the focus moves to the NFL Draft and experts trying to guess which team is going to pick which player. The Minnesota Vikings are sitting with the No. 8 overall pick and the latest mock drafts have the Vikes taking either Blake Bortles or C.J. Mosley with that pick. I have said before that Minnesota shouldn’t be thinking about the quarterback position in the first round. The defense needs a lot of help and Mosley could be a good place to start depending on what the team wants to do with the linebacker position.
Erin Henderson has had some legal trouble and Chad Greenway is more of an outside linebacker these days. It is quite possible that the team cuts Henderson and moves on with someone like Mosley at middle linebacker from day one in 2014. The secondary is somewhere that the Vikings must address early as well in the draft though and could look towards that position instead. The names Justin Gilbert and Ha Ha Clinton-Dix are going to come up a lot in the next three months before the draft actually happens.
The team is already down a quarterback with Matt Cassel voiding the final year of his deal earlier this week. I would have to assume that the Vikings are going to take a quarterback before round two is over with and could potentially even pick two quarterbacks in this draft depending on who they can end up with. The experts have their options on where Minnesota should be going. They are getting paid a lot of money to analyze every single player that is going to be in the draft each year. The number of surprises though that happen along the way will throw their mock drafts into disarray within two or three picks probably.
There are many decisions waiting to be made in Minnesota. Could new coach Mike Zimmer want to go with a very strong defense to stay in line with his thinking from his time in Cincinnati? It was shown in the Super Bowl that a great defense can stop a great offense. Would Zimmer want to get his franchise quarterback early in the first round even with the team’s problems doing that in the past? The decision makers have their own plan of attack I’m sure so take what the experts say with a grain of salt three months out.